With each
of the two commanders-in-chief there were associated on the Italian
side six, on the Roman side five, lieutenant-commanders, each of whom
conducted the attack or defence in a definite district, while the
consular armies were destined to act more freely and to strike the
decisive blow. The most esteemed Roman officers, such as Gaius
Marius, Quintus Catulus, and the two consulars of experience in the
Spanish war, Titus Didius and Publius Crassus, placed themselves at
the disposal of the consuls for these posts; and though the Italians
had not names so celebrated to oppose to them, yet the result
showed that their leaders were in a military point of view nowise
inferior to the Romans.

The offensive in this thoroughly desultory war was on the whole on the
side of the Romans, but was nowhere decisively assumed even on their
part. It is surprising that the Romans did not collect their troops
for the purpose of attacking the insurgents with a superior force,
and that the insurgents made no attempt to advance into Latium and to
throw themselves on the hostile capital. We are how ever too little
acquainted with their respective circumstances to judge whether or
how they could have acted otherwise, or to what extent the remissness
of the Roman government on the one hand and the looseness of the
connection among the federate communities on the other contributed
to this want of unity in the conduct of the war. It is easy to see
that with such a system there would doubtless be victories and defeats,
but the final settlement might be very long delayed; and it is no less
plain that a clear and vivid picture of such a war--which resolved
itself into a series of engagements on the part of individual corps
operating at the same time, sometimes separately, sometimes in
combination--cannot be prepared out of the remarkably fragmentary
accounts which have come down to us.